gaming

Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools

AI, Artificial Intelligence, game development, gaming, generative ai, tools / DJ Henderson / January 18, 2024

Do androids dream of Tetris? —

But 84% of devs are at least somewhat concerned about ethical use of those tools.

Kyle Orland – Jan 18, 2024 7: 10 pm UTC

Enlarge / The future of game development?

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use.

The Game Developers Conference’s 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill.

Forty-nine percent of the survey’s developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do.

Enlarge / A majority of game developers said their workplace was at least interested in using generative AI tools.

The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in “narrative/writing.”

Among the 38 percent of respondents who said their company didn’t use AI tools, 15 percent said their company was “interested” in pursuing them, while 23 percent said they had “no interest.” In a separate question, 12 percent of respondents said their company didn’t allow the use of AI tools at all, a number that went up to 21 percent for respondents working at the largest “AAA developers.” An additional 7 percent said the use of some specific AI tools was not allowed, while 30 percent said AI tool use was “optional” at their company.

Worries abound

The wide embrace of AI tools hasn’t seemed to lessen worries about their use among developers, though. A full 42 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about the ethics of using generative AI in game development, with an additional 42 percent being “somewhat concerned.” Only 12 percent said they were “not concerned at all” about those usage ethics.

Enlarge / Developer policies on AI use varied greatly, with a plurality saying their company had no official policy.

Overall, respondents offered a split opinion on whether the use of AI tools would be overall positive (21 percent) or negative (18 percent) for the industry. Most respondents seemed split, with 57 percent saying the impact would be “mixed.”

Developers cited coding assistance, content creation efficiency, and the automation of repetitive tasks as the primary uses for AI tools, according to the report.

“I’d like to see AI tools that help with the current workflows and empower individual artists with their own work,” one anonymous respondent wrote. “What I don’t want to see is a conglomerate of artists being enveloped in an AI that just does 99% of the work a creative is supposed to do.”

Elsewhere in the report, the survey found that only 17 percent of developers were at least somewhat interested in using blockchain technology in their upcoming projects, down significantly from 27 percent in 2022. An overwhelming 77 percent of respondents said they had no interest in blockchain technology, similar to recent years.

The survey also found that 57 percent of respondents thought that workers in the game industry should unionize, up from 53 percent last year. Despite this, only 23 percent said they were either in a union or had discussed unionization at their workplace.

Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools Read More »

Harmonix is ending Rock Band DLC releases after 16 years, ~2,800 songs

DLC, downloads, epic, epic games, gaming, Harmonix, Rock, rock band, song / Mike M. / January 17, 2024

Don’t look back in anger —

Previously purchased songs will still be playable via Rock Band 4.

Kyle Orland – Jan 17, 2024 9: 00 pm UTC

After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/RockBand4_NoHUD_03-640×360.jpg”></img><figcaption>
<p>After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>Here at Ars Technica, we remember covering <em>Rock Band</em>‘s weekly DLC song releases <a href= — Enlarge / A couple of folks absolutely getting down to *Rock Band 2* at that game’s 2008 launch party at LA’s Orpheum Theatre.

Getty Images

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That’s never happened before: Games Done Quick video stars speedrunning dog

games done quick, gaming, speedrun / Mike M. / January 17, 2024

Personal Best Boy —

The Shiba Inu was trained to use a custom controller in a game meant for a robot.

Samuel Axon – Jan 17, 2024 8: 27 pm UTC

Peanut Butter the dog speedruns Gyromite at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024.

The twice-a-year video game speedrunning and fundraising live event Games Done Quick has been a source of amazement and joy for years, but we’re still saying “that’s never happened before” even now, more than a decade after the first event.

Case in point: Awesome Games Done Quick 2024, which is streaming live 24 hours a day this week on Twitch, saw the very first speedrun performed by a dog.

A Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter (shortened to PB, also a speedrunner term for “personal best” finish time) completed a 30-minute speedrun of the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game Gyromite.

Gyromite was originally bundled with the nostalgic but failed ROB (Robotic Operating Buddy) accessory for the NES. It’s a platformer of sorts, but not a conventional fast-paced one. Rather, it’s a comparatively slow-moving game where you make inputs to raise and lower pipes to allow a character to pass through the level safely.

In the speedrun, PB took over for the robot in a category called B Game. PB didn’t set a world record or a personal best (most GDQ runners don’t at the event), as there were a couple minor mistakes, but he still finished the game under its estimate by dutifully sitting, pressing buttons, and holding down those buttons at the right moments at owner JSR_’s prompts. JSR_ also prompted PB to periodically bark “hello” to the stream’s tens of thousands of viewers. PB received numerous treats throughout the run, including bits of cheese and ham.

The final time was 26 minutes and 24 seconds, compared to PB’s personal best of 25 minutes, 29 seconds. The human record is 24 minutes and 39 seconds, by a runner named Octopuscal. PB’s PB is currently the world record among dogs, but of course, he’s the only runner in that particular category.

Speedrunner JSR_ adopted PB during the height of the pandemic and has spent a portion of every day training him to press and hold large buttons on a custom controller for treats in order to play the game. “This took years of training,” he said. “I wanted to train him to do something special, when I realized as a puppy that he was much smarter than most other dogs I’ve seen. Since I’m a speedrunner (and PB was literally named after, you know, getting a ‘PB’ in a speedrun) it only made sense to me.”

You can see the full video of the run above. Awesome Games Done Quick is an annual event benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. A sister event called Summer Games Done Quick benefits Doctors Without Borders later in the year. You can watch and donate on the event website.

That’s never happened before: Games Done Quick video stars speedrunning dog Read More »

Why I hope the Atari 400 Mini will bring respect to Atari’s most underrated platform

atari, Atari 2600, Atari 400, Atari 8-bit, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 800, atari vcs, commodore 64, gaming, HDMI, mini consoles, MULE, retrotech, Tech / Mike M. / January 16, 2024

Have you played Atari today? —

Can USB, HDMI, and built-in games raise awareness for a platform overshadowed by the C64?

Benj Edwards – Jan 16, 2024 7: 42 pm UTC

Retro Games' THE400 Mini console. — Enlarge / Retro Games’ THE400 Mini console.

Retro Games / Benj Edwards

Last week, UK-based Retro Games, Ltd. announced a mini console version of the Atari 400 home computer, first released in 1979. It’s called “THE400 Mini,” and it includes HDMI video output, 25 built-in games, a USB version of Atari’s famous joystick, and it retails for $120. But this release means something more to me personally because my first computer was an Atari 400—and as any other Atari 8-bit computer fan can tell you, the platform often doesn’t get the respect it should. This will be the first time Atari’s 8-bit computer line has received a major retro-remake release.

My Atari 400 story goes a little something like this. Around the time I was born in 1981, my dad bought my older brother (then 5 years old) an Atari 400 so he could play games and learn to program. My brother almost immediately found its flat membrane keyboard frustrating and the Atari 410 cassette drive too slow, so my dad ordered an Atari 800 and an Atari 810 disk drive instead. This began our family’s golden age of Atari 800 gaming, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I’ve often said if a modern game designer wants to learn how to make games, just dive into the Atari 400/800 game library. There are some priceless gems there you can’t find anywhere else, plus others that play best on the platform. OK, I’ll name a few: The Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, M.U.L.E., Wizard of Wor, Salmon Run, Star Raiders, The Halley Project, and so much more.

A photo of Benj Edwards' family Atari 800 and Atari 400 in his brother's room, Christmas 1985. — Enlarge / A photo of Benj Edwards’ family Atari 800 and Atari 400 in his brother’s room, Christmas 1985.

Even with the new 800, it seems that my dad must have kept the original Atari 400, because by the time I grew up more and wanted “my own computer” in the late 1980s, he gave me the Atari 400. The 800 was still my brother’s baby and typically remained in his bedroom. When I wasn’t playing more complex games like M.U.L.E. and Archon on the 800 with my brother, I hooked up the 400 to a small black-and-white TV set in my room and mostly played Galaxian, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong on a cartridge. Not long after, I got an Apple II Plus and learned BASIC on that, but the Atari 400 always got pride of place in my growing computer collection.

A snippet from a 1988 to-do list written by Benj Edwards' dad that says — Enlarge / A snippet from a 1988 to-do list written by Benj Edwards’ dad that says “Get TV/monitor for Benj’s Atari 400 computer,” completed 4/14/88.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the new Atari 400 Mini. I haven’t used it myself yet, so all we have to go on is the information provided by the company—and the company’s reputation. Retro Games has previously released full-sized remakes of the Commodore VIC-20 and the Commodore 64, and mini consoles of the Amiga 500 and the Commodore 64. In 2020, Engadget gave the company’s “THE64 Mini” mixed reviews, praising its looks but complaining about its joystick and poor game selection. We’ll admit preconceived bias and hope the 400 Mini fares much better. Even if the joystick ends up a dud, Retro Games says you can provide your own USB stick or controller.

I also hope THE400 does well because Atari 8-bit fans have a tough time with group identity in the span of retro tech history. Few Americans aside from Atari 400/800 owners have heard of the platform (though the platform did very well in Eastern Europe). The Atari 8-bit series didn’t sell nearly as well as competitors like the Commodore 64 in the US (although Sean Lennon had an Atari 400 as a kid—cool trivia).

And even though the Atari 400/800 series provided the template for Commodore to imitate with the VIC-20 and C64, Commodore undercut Atari in price with cheaper parts, which contributed to Atari’s crash in 1983 and drove Texas Instruments out of the home computer business. More recently, the Commodore 64 has had several retro re-releases since the Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV in 2004. The Atari 400/800 platform has had none until now.

Why I hope the Atari 400 Mini will bring respect to Atari’s most underrated platform Read More »

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

App Store, Apple, Apple v Epic, epic, fortnite, gaming, Google, Policy, Supreme Court, Tech / Mike M. / January 16, 2024

Epic v. Apple —

Most of Epic’s arguments are moot now, but one point will change the App Store.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 16, 2024 5: 43 pm UTC

Fortnite characters looking across the many islands and vast realm of the game. — Enlarge / Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.

Epic Games

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.

Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.

Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options Read More »

Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial

billy mitchell, defamation, Donkey Kong, gaming, lawsuit, twin galaxies / Kelly Newman / January 15, 2024

Two men give a presentation in what appears to be a hotel room. — Enlarge / Billy Mitchell (left) and Twin Galaxies owner Jace Hall (center) attend an event at the Arcade Expo 2015 in Banning, California.

The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and “International Scoreboard” Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Courthouse News reports that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies have reached a confidential settlement in the case months before an oft-delayed trial was finally set to start.

The settlement comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell’s witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had “debased myself before this Court” and “allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement” by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.

But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell’s side to task for “what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence.” The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended “to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court,” he wrote.

Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.” height=”1024″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mitchellpaper.jpg” width=”683″></img><figcaption>
<p>Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>In <a href=

Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial Read More »

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

gaming, mobile game ads, puzzle games / Kelly Newman / January 13, 2024

Can YOU reach the treasure? —

It’s pin-pulling, color-pouring, fake-but-real fun, and you only pay once.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 11, 2024 10: 53 pm UTC

Pin-pulling puzzle with a stick figure, boulder, and treasure. — Enlarge / Can *you* master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge?

D3Publisher

You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?

The stage select music gets to be a bit much, but nobody will sue you if you play with the sound off.

That’s exactly what Those Games are. Their full title is Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam. The package is $10 on all platforms.

Some people will find that price a bargain, given the chance to prove how much better they’d be at these kinds of puzzles than the psychological dark patterns that taunt them. Some people might wait for a sale, given that you are, in fact, getting some very free-to-play-esque puzzles. But having spent more time than I expected tackling them, I can vouch that once you get past the first few patronizing levels and adjust to some slightly muddy controls in a couple of titles, each set of games starts giving you real, thoughtfully constructed challenges.

Three of the games in Those Games were instantly familiar to me, a person who owns a smartphone and reads things on it. Surprisingly, I had never seen the last two in the list here:

Pin Pull, removing barriers between you, monsters, traps, and treasure in the right order
Number Tower, sending your number-ranked fighter to tackle numbered monsters, potions, power-ups, and rebuffs in the right order
Color Lab, combining similar colors from vials in the right order
Parking Lot, moving cars facing different directions out of a lot with a circular drive, in the right order
Cash Run, clicking on an auto-walking man to have him pile up money to avoid obstacles, finishing with enough to not be “poor” and disappoint his spouse

I got a few levels past this Pin Pull stage, but not through all 50. Troll clubs goblin, goblins run toward stick guy, so when do you release rock?

DCPublisher
As with most of the games, the inherent “how hard could it be?” starts coming back on you as the complications multiply.

DCPublisher
You can’t pour a full, single-color vial, and that makes the later levels of Color Lab an actual challenge.

DCPublisher
Parking Lot is fun, but only if you stop caring about timing and star ratings, given the quirky controls.

DCPublisher
Cash Run is perhaps the only game in the set you could suggest has a deeper meaning, vis-a-vis capitalism. It’s also harder to grasp than the others.

DCPublisher

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles Read More »

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement

demake, gaming, Homebrew, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, portal, portal 64, valve / DJ Henderson / January 12, 2024

Doing what they can because they must —

It’s not the use of Portal, it’s the use of an N64 SDK that’s the issue.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 12, 2024 7: 23 pm UTC

Window open inside Portal 64 — Enlarge / Valve took a look inside *Portal 64*, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment.

Valve/James Lambert

Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo’s classic platforms, done outside Nintendo’s blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo’s wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.

That’s why, one week after announcing that his years-long “demake” of Valve’s classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its “First Slice” ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There’s no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, “communication with Valve” that “because the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down.”

Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.

It’s far from the first time Valve has taken preemptive action to avoid Nintendo’s involvement. In mid-2023, a Wii/GameCube emulator, Dolphin, halted its planned release on Valve’s Steam platform after Nintendo contacted Valve and requested the emulator not be released. In that case, the Dolphin emulator’s weakness to potential action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions was its use of a proprietary cryptographic key from the Wii. Rather than argue about keys, BIOS files, and other matters in court, Dolphin gave up on Steam, while keeping the project alive elsewhere.

Valve has seemingly been silent on Portal 64 until now. Playing the game required access to a Steam-purchased copy of Portal, with one of that game’s data files then patched by Lambert’s software to work inside Nintendo 64 emulators. Lambert wasn’t charging for his project, although he did have a Patreon to further his work on it. Lambert told PC Gamer that he thought “Valve didn’t want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP,” and he didn’t blame them.

The “Nintendo’s proprietary libraries” at issue inside Lambert’s project appear to be Libultra, the official SDK provided to those developing Nintendo 64 games on Silicon Graphics machines (and later other platforms). There exists an open source N64 SDK, libdragon, but Lambert told PC Gamer that he wouldn’t move over to that without assurance that it would appease Valve—and, by proxy, Nintendo. Lambert has many more N64-related and adjacent projects to work on, judging from his YouTube channel.

Nintendo has been remarkably successful over the years at keeping games and tributes it didn’t make from remaining in place: cover art for emulated Switch games, explanations of emulator installation, fan games, Game & Watch hacks, and even Mario-themed Minecraft videos. The company has created a general atmosphere of legal fear around anything touching its properties. That extends, apparently, even to large, well-resourced companies with far more tolerance for fan hacking.

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement Read More »

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS

ayaneo, gaming, steam machines, steamos, valve / DJ Henderson / January 11, 2024

Enlarge / Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.

Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago, we’ve seen plenty of would-be competitors that have tried to mimic the Deck’s portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing one of the Steam Deck’s best features: integration with the increasingly robust , Linux-based SteamOS 3 .

That’s finally set to change with the just-announced Ayaneo Next Lite, the first non-Valve portable hardware set to come with SteamOS pre-installed. We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve’s gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.

A bespoke, portable gaming OS

Ayaneo’s announcement highlights a few vague-ish features of the Next Lite, including a 7-inch 800p screen, a 47 Wh battery, and drift-resistant hall-effect joysticks. But even though the announcement doesn’t include a specific asking price, Ayaneo promises that the device “integrates outstanding cost-effectiveness” and will be “the all-new cost-effective choice with flagship experiences.”

That ad copy highlights one of the main advantages a SteamOS-based gaming portable brings over one sporting Windows: cost. Sure, OEMs are likely paying much less than the $139 consumer asking price for a copy of Windows 11. Still, even a $70-per-unit bulk license would represent a good 10 percent of the ASUS ROG Ally’s $700 asking price (and an even bigger chunk of the price difference between the Ally and the Steam Deck). In an increasingly competitive portable PC gaming market, being able to cut out that significant cost over Windows-based alternatives could be a big deal.

Enlarge / Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.

Then there’s the interface. Modern Windows is designed with a desktop/laptop or tablet form factor in mind. That UI definitely leaves something to be desired when forced into a 7- or 8-inch touchscreen that lacks a keyboard and mouse. Our review of the ROG Ally highlights just how annoying it can be to have to fiddle with Windows settings on a touchscreen running “an awkwardly scaled” version of the OS. And while Microsoft has experimented with a handheld-friendly version of Windows meant for portable gaming devices, nothing public has yet come of the effort.

SteamOS 3, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up with portable gaming on Steam Deck in mind. That comes through in many little ways, like a built-in “suspend” mode, tons of battery-optimization features, and menus that are designed for a small screen and joystick navigation.

And let’s not forget the way that most Steam games are pre-configured and optimized to “just work” on the OS after you download them, eliminating the kind of settings tweaking that’s often needed when running Windows on a gaming portable. As Ars’ Kevin Purdy summed it up in his ROG Ally review, “I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally’s combination of Windows 11 and Asus’ own Armoury Crate software.”

Who needs Windows?

The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.” height=”480″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/rogally-640×480.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A mess of launchers and OS cruft crowd the screen when launching The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.

Kevin Purdy

Yes, a Windows installation means a gaming portable is compatible with almost every PC game ever made, including many that still don’t run on SteamOS for one reason or another. But SteamOS’s robust Proton compatibility layer means an ever-expanding list of thousands of games are certified as at least “Playable” on SteamOS, including most of Steam’s most popular titles. That’s a huge change from the desktop-focused “Steam Machines” era of the mid-’10s, when early versions of SteamOS could only run the relative handful of games that developers bothered to explicitly port to Linux.

While Proton does come with at least some performance overhead, a variety of Steam Deck benchmarks show games running under SteamOS tend to perform comparably (or sometimes better) than those running under Windows on the handheld. That’s also a huge change from the Steam Machines era, when Ars’ testing showed that many SteamOS games ran significantly worse than their Windows counterparts on the same desktop hardware.

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS Read More »

Valve now allows the “vast majority” of AI-powered games on Steam

AI, gaming, steam, vale / DJ Henderson / January 10, 2024

Open the flood gates —

New reporting system will enforce “guardrails” for “live-generated” AI content.

Kyle Orland – Jan 10, 2024 4: 44 pm UTC

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's none of them). — Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it’s none of them).

Aurich Lawson

Last summer, Valve told Ars Technica that it was worried about potential legal issues surrounding games made with the assistance of AI models trained on copyrighted works and that it was “working through how to integrate [AI] into our already-existing review policies.” Today, the company is rolling out the results of that months-long review, announcing a new set of developer policies that it says “will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use [AI tools].”

Developers that use AI-powered tools “in the development [or] execution of your game” will now be allowed to put their games on Steam so long as they disclose that usage in the standard Content Survey when submitting to Steam. Such AI integration will be separated into categories of “pre-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools during development” (e.g., using DALL-E for in-game images) and “live-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools while the game is running” (e.g., using Nvidia’s AI-powered NPC technology).

Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content. But disclosure will not be sufficient for games that use live-generated AI for “Adult Only Sexual Content,” which Valve says it is “unable to release… right now.”

Put up the guardrails

For pre-generated AI content, Valve warns that developers still have to ensure that their games “will not include illegal or infringing content.” But that promise only extends to the “output of AI-generated content” and doesn’t address the copyright status of content used by the training models themselves. The status of those training models was a primary concern for Valve last summer when the company cited the “legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models,” but such concerns don’t even merit a mention in today’s new policies.

For live-generated content, on the other hand, Valve is requiring developers “to tell us what kind of guardrails you’re putting on your AI to ensure it’s not generating illegal content.” Such guardrails should hopefully prevent situations like that faced by AI Dungeon, which in 2021 drew controversy for using an OpenAI model that could be used to generate sexual content featuring children in the game. Valve says a new “in-game overlay” will allow players to submit reports if they run into that kind of inappropriate AI-generated content in Steam games.

Over the last year or so, many game developers have started to embrace a variety of AI tools in the creation of everything from background art and NPC dialogue to motion capture and voice generation. But some developers have taken a hardline stance against anything that could supplant the role of humans in game making. “We are extremely against the idea that anything creative could or should take [the] place of skilled specialists, to which we mean ourselves,” Digital Extremes Creative Director Rebecca Ford told the CBC last year.

In September, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded to reports of a ChatGPT-powered game being banned from Steam by explicitly welcoming such games on the Epic Games Store. “We don’t ban games for using new technologies,” Sweeney wrote on social media.

Valve now allows the “vast majority” of AI-powered games on Steam Read More »

Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar is anti-blur monitor tech aimed squarely at your eyeball

g-sync, gaming, gaming monitors, Monitors, NVIDIA, Tech, variable refresh rate, VRR / DJ Henderson / January 9, 2024

What will they sync of next? —

Branded monitors can sync pixels to backlighting, refresh rate, and GPU frames.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 9, 2024 5: 10 pm UTC

Motion blur demonstration of G-Sync Pulsar, with — Enlarge / None of this would be necessary if it weren’t for your inferior eyes, which retain the colors of pixels for fractions of a second longer than is optimal for shooting dudes.

Nvidia

Gaming hardware has done a lot in the last decade to push a lot of pixels very quickly across screens. But one piece of hardware has always led to complications: the eyeball. Nvidia is targeting that last part of the visual quality chain with its newest G-Sync offering, Pulsar.

Motion blur, when it’s not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by “the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen,” as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor’s backlight.

You can’t just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing “a novel algorithm” in “synergizing” its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting.

Nvidia also claims that Pulsar can help with the visual discomfort caused by some strobing effects, as the feature “intelligently controls the pulse’s brightness and duration.”

The featureless axis labels make my brain hurt, but I believe this chart suggests that G-Sync Pulsar does the work of timing out exactly when to refresh screen pixels at 360 Hz.

Nvidia
The same, but this time at 200 Hz.

Nvidia
And again, this time at 100 Hz. Rapidly changing pixels are weird, huh?

Nvidia

To accommodate this “radical rethinking of display technology,” a monitor will need Nvidia’s own chips built in. There are none yet, but the Asus ROG Swift PG27 Series G-Sync and its 360 Hz refresh rate is coming “later this year.” No price for that monitor is available yet.

It’s hard to verify how this looks and feels without hands-on time. PC Gamer checked out Pulsar at CES this week and verified that, yes, it’s easier to read the name of the guy you’re going to shoot while you’re strafing left and right at an incredibly high refresh rate. Nvidia also provided a video, captured at 1,000 frames per second, for those curious.

Nvidia’s demonstration of G-Sync Pulsar, using Counter-Strike 2 filmed at 1000 fps, on a 360 Hz monitor, with Pulsar on and off, played back at 1/24 speed.

Pulsar signals Nvidia’s desire to once again create an exclusive G-Sync monitor feature designed to encourage a wraparound Nvidia presence on the modern gaming PC. It’s a move that has sometimes backfired on the firm before. The company relented to market pressures in 2019 and enabled G-Sync in various variable refresh rate monitors powered by VESA’s Display port Adaptive-Sync tech (more commonly known by its use in AMD’s FreeSync monitors). G-Sync monitors were selling for typically hundreds of dollars more than their FreeSync counterparts, and while they technically had some exclusive additional features, the higher price points likely hurt Nvidia’s appeal when a gamer was looking at the full cost of new or upgraded system.

There will not be any such cross-standard compatibility with G-Sync Pulsar, which will only be offered on monitors with a G-Sync Ultimate badge, and then further support Pulsar, specifically. There’s always a chance that another group will develop its own synced-strobe technology that could work across GPUs, but nothing is happening as of yet.

In related frame-rate news, Nvidia also announced this week that its GeForce Now game streaming service will offer G-Sync capabilities to those on Ultimate or Priority memberships and playing on capable screens. Nvidia claims that, paired with its Reflex offering on GeForce Now, the two “make cloud gaming experiences nearly indistinguishable from local ones.” I’ll emphasize here that those are Nvidia’s words, not the author’s.

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Unity lays off an additional 25 percent of its staffers

game engine, gaming, layoffs, unity, unity engine / DJ Henderson / January 9, 2024

Disunity —

1,800 newly announced job cuts come on top of 1,300 layoffs since mid-2022.

Kyle Orland – Jan 9, 2024 4: 13 pm UTC

When Unity laid off 265 Weta Digital engineers in November, the company warned that more layoffs would be necessary in the near future as part of a plan to “refocus” on the company’s core game engine business. A large chunk of those changes became real on Monday as the Unity Engine maker told the SEC that “it plans to reduce approximately 1,800 employee roles, or approximately 25% of its current workforce.”

“This decision was not taken lightly, and we extend our deepest gratitude to those affected for their dedication and contributions,” Unity Director of PR Kelly Ekins said in a statement to The Verge. Ekins added that the layoffs will be spread across “all teams,” and a company spokesperson told Reuters that this round of layoffs will be complete by March, with additional internal changes coming thereafter.

The massive staffing cuts come after over 1,300 layoffs already implemented across the company in multiple waves since June 2022 (including those November Weta Digital cuts). Despite that, Unity’s statement to the SEC says these further cuts are necessary “to position [the company] for long-term and profitable growth.”

Hemorrhaging money

The company’s recent financial statements show why such a drastic change is even being considered. Despite annual revenues measured in the billions, Unity has struggled to show a profit in recent years, reporting net losses of $859 million for the 12 months ending in September 2023.

Unity’s stock price, which jumped nearly 4 percent in the immediate wake of the layoff news late Monday, is back down to its lowest level since mid-December as of Tuesday morning. That stock price is currently down nearly 40 percent from its late 2020 IPO and off over 80 percent from its peak in late 2021.

But Unity stock is now up over 40 percent since interim CEO Jim Whitehurst (who was the former CEO of Red Hat) announced a “company reset” in a November shareholder letter. At the time, Whitehurst warned that Unity “will likely include discontinuing certain product offerings, reducing our workforce, and reducing our office footprint” as the company implements plans “to increase our focus on our core; the Unity Editor and Runtime, and Monetization Solutions.”

Recovering from Riccitiello

Of course, Whitehurst was only in a position to make that kind of statement after October’s abrupt resignation of Unity CEO John Riccitiello after nine years heading the company. Riccitiello departed amid the announcement and significant rollback of a developer-enraging plan to charge “per-install” fees on all Unity Engine games. That botched rollout—which has since been scaled back to a capped runtime fee for successful commercial projects—contributed to a sense of widespread joy over Riccitiello’s departure across the game development community.

Riccitiello oversaw Unity through an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions after the company’s IPO, including cloud gaming service Parsec, mobile ad giant Ironsource, and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch, to name just a few. Those ancillary products and services may be in particular danger as Unity plans to “reduc[e] the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability,” as Whitehurst wrote Monday in a company memo obtained by Reuters.

Even with the massively reduced headcount and new focus on the engine business, Unity isn’t expecting its corporate fortunes to turn around any time soon. In his November investor letter, Whitehurst said, “We expect the impact of this [runtime fee] business model change to have minimal benefit in 2024 and ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases.”

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